Opinions of a Professional Reader

Suppose Thomas Dewey beat Truman in the Election of 1948, and suppose President Dewey was much more willing to throw money at the nascent space program. And then suppose an asteroid smacked into the Earth just off Chesapeake Bay and obliterated the eastern seaboard, including Washington, D.C. and the entire American government, leaving the Secretary of Agriculture (who was on a Midwestern farm tour) as the new president. (more…)

It’s possible this nicely done book hits a stronger chord with me than it might with younger readers, inasmuch as I was born before the beginning of the Atomic Age and grew up in the ’50s in a world in the grip of the Cold War. The author doesn’t oversimplify the issues surrounding the development and use of atomic weapons, either.

I’ve been fascinated by history since adolescence, and I ended up with a couple of degrees in it, but my preference has always been for social history and material history. Not kings and treaties and the broad sweep of anonymous events but intimate, everyday, “people next door” history. And that also laps over into the areas of local history and genealogy, and also archival management, in all of which I spent most of my career.

Under his own name, British author Tom Holt writes some pretty good historical fiction, mostly set in the ancient world, as well as some rather mediocre attempts at humor with a fantasy theme. As “K. J. Parker,” though, he has produced some first-rate epic fantasy, all of it populated only by humans (no wizards, orcs, or dragons, and absolutely no magic or supernatural goings on) and most of it with a historical feel to it.

The advance information I saw on this book was a bit confusing. The reviews were good, but the blurb was basically, “A little girl accidentally discovers a giant, glowing, metal hand buried in South Dakota, and when she grows up, she becomes a physicist and is put in charge of studying it.” I had no idea what to make of that, but what the hell. Del Rey doesn’t often publish crap, right? Well, I’m writing this review on not too much sleep, because I stayed up much of the night to finish it. It was an absolutely absorbing story.

I’ve long been fascinated by Charles Babbage and his “difference engine” (almost always confused with his completely separate “analytical engine,” which was the first instance of the concepts which grew into the digital computer, more than a century later), especially after reading Gibson and Sterling’s 1991 novel. Babbage was a first-rate mathematician — he held Isaac Newton’s Lucasian Chair of math at Cambridge, most recently occupied by Stephen Hawking — but Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate child of the mad, bad, dangerous Lord Byron, was a certified math genius.

Perry has written some two dozen books, most of them thrillers of one variety or another — but not “mysteries,” because you always know whodunit from the beginning. It’s more a matter of witnessing what the Bad Guys do, how that affects those around them, and how their assorted nemeses attempt to stop them. (And they don’t always succeed.) This one involves a nameless killer with no political or other outside motivation who is very, very good at building bombs. Why? He wants to lure in and kill off the LAPD bomb squad, and he manages to get appalling close to his goal.

This is number eleven in the series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Surete, one of the most recognizable cops in Canada (he’s often in the papers) and now retired to the tiny, off-the-map village of Three Pines, down near the Vermont border. And this one includes a large swath of genuine history that most people, even most Canadians, have never heard of before.

Roach has become known for her popular science journalism which combine a dorky sense of humor with an investigative journalist’s endless curiosity. She likes short, punchy titles and her subject matter often is not for the squeamish: The first book of hers I read was Stiff, about cadavers.

This extremely inventive and beautifully written debut space opera is the most fun I’ve had in some time. The setting is some centuries in the future, when mankind has pretty much ruined Earth and the majority of our species now spend their lives in huge refugee “homestead ships,” the Exodus Fleet, wandering between the stars. The more well-off survivors abandoned the planet early and escaped to Mars, which is now the human center of the Solar System.

Where Does This Stuff Come From?

As a retired public librarian (large system in a large Southern city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of others for 50 years now. Starting in 1999, I began posting my reviews to a personal website, but in 2009, I discovered Wordpress & shifted my reviewing jones to a blog.

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What Do I Read?

What do you have? My tastes in reading are extremely eclectic and I seldom follow a plan. My "to read" list is lengthy and always growing; it presently runs to 50+ pages. Sometimes I'll pick up a book on the strength of a favorable review. Sometimes I simply browse the "New Books" section at the library. Sometimes I discover a series of novels and read the whole sequence, one volume after another. I read a great deal of science fiction, cookbooks, mysteries, archaeology, Dickens, art books, historical novels, architecture, children's as well as YA books, language and grammar, chick-lit, Civil War history, graphic novels, Terry Pratchett, experimental literature, travel books, books about books and reading -- almost anything you can think of (with the exceptions of sports books and western novels, which simply bore me).

A Note about Reviews from the More Distant Past

Since books never go out of date, all the pages below are quarterly cumulations of my past book reviews (with the number of reviews on each page indicated). You can browse or you can find specific authors or titles (or any other word or phrase) through the search box above. (Categories and tags, unfortunately, cannot be attached to pages.)